Adventure Travel Company Brings Gorillas Up Close And Personal


Adventure travel
might include hiking or camping in the wilderness of America’s pacific northwest, backpacking through Europe or climbing a mountain in Tibet. On their own or with local guidance, adventure travelers often see places others only dream of. Not satisfied with a packaged tour, visiting the same places over and over again or waiting any longer for their dream to come true, they turn to travel companies who specialize in remote, rarely-visited locations.

Sanctuary Retreats is a travel company that knows something about adventure travel. On safari in Africa since 1999, they own and operate 11 lodges and camps in Zambia, Botswana and Tanzania. In Uganda, Sanctuary Gorilla Forest Camp is located in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a good base for a gorilla tracking experience the heart of the rainforest.Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is home to the Batwa Pygmy tribe and has more than 350 species of birds, 200 species of butterflies, rare forest elephants, giant forest hog, forest duiker antelope and bushbuck antelope. But it is the 11 kinds of primates, including red-tailed and blue monkeys, black and white colobus, baboons and chimpanzees, that draw adventure travelers to the Sanctuary Gorilla Forest Camp.

Serving as a base camp for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to track mountain gorillas, travelers venture out on custom designed itineraries through some of the most beautiful jungle in the world, as we see in this video:


Sanctuary Retreats also sails a fleet of expedition cruise ships on the Yangzi river in China and the Nile river in Egypt as well as through the Galapagos Islands.

[Photo Credit- Flickr User extremeboh]

China’s ‘Golden Waterway’ Turns Blood Red




Those who believe a zombie apocalypse is upon us will be having a field day with this story. China‘s Yangtze River, also known as “The Golden Waterway,” has ironically turned blood red. While mostly occurring around the industrial city of Chongquing, the incident has been noted in other areas, as well.

According to the Herald Sun, Chinese officials are speculating pollution is to blame. However, others say the Yangtze is too large and fast flowing for bacteria contamination to create a “red tide” effect.

Last year, the country experienced a similar incident on the Jian River in Luoyang. Illegal dye workshops dumping their dye into the city’s storm drain were found to be the cause. This year’s mystery, however, is yet to be solved.

For more details and to see images of the event itself, check out the video above.

Dam it, People Move!

There was an interesting expose on China’s Three Gorges Dam in yesterday’s WSJ (Europe ed.). It looks like up to 4.8 million more people might have to move from the Yangtze River valley because of the dam.

The massive $25B power project, completed last May, has already displaced approximately 1.4 million people, as their land has been submerged because the area behind the dam has filled. When I was there in 2005, the water level was about 132 meters (435 ft.), and it’s now at 157m, and it’s expected to hit 175m in 2009. The reservoir is 640km (400 miles) long (about 1/10th the length of the whole river).

Obviously, the dam is important to China, which needs the power for its growing economy. The dam provides ten times the electricity of the Hoover Dam.

Some frightening stats from the article:

  • 60% of the new shoreline is too steep to farm.
  • the water is moving so slowly behind the dam that the port of Chongqing (seen at right on a “sunny” day) is expected to silt over in ten years. (This is a big deal, considering the size and economic importance of that city, with an estimated at 55 million inhabitants in that economic “municipality.”)
  • the dam is making the local weather even more foggy and humid than before. (ouch.)
  • fish populations are dwindling because of disrupted river flows. (I didn’t see a single living bird, duck, goose, swan, or fish during my days on the Yangtze, so I’m not too surprised.)